When I met the first strike of that poison-dripping stinger, our limits became obvious—the first strike ripped your extensors to shit, clanged down your forearms and up into your feeble upper arms like a miniature strike team had entered the tendons and set the whole thing to blow. The pain came in waves. But some ancient engine had revved to life for me in a way it never had done for you, probably because I am a good girl and you are an evil nun, and it tore through us almost simultaneously: renewed those shredded muscles, tied back together that multitude of miniature rips. My first overhead strike shattered the stinger, and the heinous thing reared and then sheared our cheek open before I could duck—but the only thing I cared about was the superheated steam feeling in our arms, and the swing, and the arc of my broadsword as I cleaved a neat arc through that creepy insectoid waist.
The creature toppled into halves. It curled up horribly in a death throe; those humanlike fingers and toes on the bottom of the frame curled in on themselves, and all the meat parts depuffed and shrivelled, and putrid-smelling guts squeezed out of the skull’s mouth hole. In that panting dark heat, the death reek was intense. And your shoulders wouldn’t stop shaking, even when I leaned against the bed.
Harrow the Ninth - Act Five, Chapter Forty-Four
